THIS JUST IN FROM OUR CULT DESK

SHOUTS & MURMURS referring to the Heaven's Gate suicide cult in California... PARIS- Pierre Salinger announced that he has "clear photographic evidence" that "something" was following Comet Hale-Bopp, as the Heaven's Gate cultists claimed. The former newsman, who says he was given the blurry photograph "by a guy in Montana," asserts that the object was either the alien spacecraft or a missile of the type that brought down T.W.A. Flight 800 last summer. He explained that the military might have mistaken the comet for a civilian airliner full of vacationing Americans and tried to shoot it down. NEW CRETIN, Ind.--Eighty members of a religious group were killed yesterday when their home-made spaceship blew up while they were fuelling it with methane produced naturally by hogs on their farm. The explosion, which was felt twenty-five miles away, occurred when a curious passing motorist stopped to observe the brightly-painted fifteen-story-high craft and lit a cigarette... CAPE CANAVERAL--Heavily armed members of a cult that believes the earth is on a collision course with a rogue space radish the size of Kansas hijacked the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis early this morning and demanded that they be flown to the Planet Altoid... A source at the Hayden Planetarium said he was unaware of the existence of a Planet Altoid... CARMA COSTA, Calif.--A sect of radical Buddhists who believe that Vice President Al Gore is the reincarnation of their twelfth-century founder, Chogram Nannandaparma Pish, set fire to themselves at a downtown shopping mall today to protest what they called "blasphemous articles in the press about the Supreme Teacher's recent fund-raising activities and toastings in Beijing." Gore, on being asked about the Bodhisattva Day Massacre during a fund-raiser at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, said he had "no controlling divine authority" over the group.... INAGADDADAVIDA, Calif.--Over half the forty-eight members of the 2000 Club millennial cult who committed suicide last week by eating live gila monsters and washing them down with peach schnapps had already had their brains surgically removed, according to the Belvedere County Medical Examiner. "It's a fairly rare procedure," he said, "but these folks seemed to know what they were doing."